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Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

The robust character of the form and ornament of this majestic wardrobe, or Schrank (storage chest), is characteristic of the traditional decorative folk style brought to southeastern Pennsylvania by Swiss craftsmen during the mid-eighteenth century. The large, extended cornice moldings, convex-molded carved panels, and symmetrically conceived designs of sulfur inlays firmly place this piece among the most artistically ambitious examples of the Baroque style as interpreted by Germanic immigrants in the third quarter of the eighteenth century. The technique of sulfur inlay, in which the molten material is poured into incised areas of decoration, has been documented among a small group of eighteenth-century Delaware Valley furniture. Peter Holl III possibly experimented with sulfur's decorative potential in conjunction with his work as a joiner and pump maker, a craft in which the material was often used to repair metal components. Jack L. Lindsey, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 265.

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